The Ancient Greeks

lr
i,t,
THE
PERIODS
ANCIENT
OF GREEK HISTORY
It is an accepteil convention today to divide the xtbsequent history
of the ancient Creeks into a number of periods, the names of
which are merely a form of shorthand (not to be taken literally, or
even as partictiarly meaningt'ul):
6REEKS
I
r. AR crrA rc : from 8oo or 75o to 5oo, in round numbers, that
is, from the time when the political geography of the Greek peninsula and the Greek coastline of Asia Minor had become reasorably fixed to the era initiated by the Persian Wars.
2.
cLAssrcAr.: the fifth and fourth
centuries, the period of
the independent city-states and, viewed in the round, of the
greatest cultural achievements in all Greek history.
3. rrrLLENrsrrc: from the time of Alexander the Great to
the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, centuries in
which Greek civilization spread east to such new centres as Alexan,
dria and Antioch, from which a Greek-Macedonian aristocracy
ruled large Near Eastern territories (such as Syria and Egypt)
under absolute monarchs.
4. RoMaN: conventionally dated from the defeat of the forces
of Antony and Cleopatra by Augustus at the battle of Actium in
jr B.c., although many Greek communities came under Roman
rule piecemeal from the third century n.c. onwards, and despite
the fact that the civilization of the eastern Roman Empire remained essentially Hellenistic to the end.
t4
AN INTRODUCTION
TO THEIR LIF'E AND THOUGHT
BY
M. I. FINLEY
NEW YORK: THE VIKING
PRESS
Colonization
zo
Archaic Gteece
"the Athenians"l the single word "Athens" never meant anything
but a spot on the map, a purely and narrowly geographical notion.
one travelled to Athens; one made war against the Athenians. The
Greeks, in sum, thought of themselves not only as Greeks (Hellenes) as against the barbarians, but also and more immediately as
*"-i"r, of groups and subgroups within Hellas' A citizen of
Thebes was a Theban and a Boeotian as well as a Greek, and each
term had its own emotional meaning backed by special myths'
And there were still other groupings, such as "tribes" inside the
community or larger abstractions outside it (like Dorians or
Ionians), to make up a complicated and sometimes even contradictory structure of memberships and loyalties'
Politically, however, the individual community alone had a clear
and unequivocal existence. The kings and chieftaius had disappeared by the end of the Dark Age-so quietly that they left no
memory, no tradition, of their overthrow (unlike the parallel stage
in Rome, for example). Even the occasional suwivals, such as the
dual monarchs of Sparta, were hereditary generals and priests, not
rulers. Power had passed to small grouPs of aristocratic families
who monopolized rnuch, if not all, of the land and ruled partly
through formal institutions, councils and magistracies; partly by
marital and kinship connexions as an Establishment; partly by the
intangible authority which came from their ancestry, for they could
all produce genealogies taking them back to famous "heroes" (and
from there, often enough, to one of the gods)'
Between the nobility and the rest of the population there were
tensions and, increasingly, open conflict, to which a number of
developments contributed. One was population growth. No figures
(not even good guesses) but the archaeological evi"u"il"bl"
"r"
dence is clear on this. Neither mainland Greece nor the Aegean
islands could support a sizable agrarian population, and the surplus could not be absorbed in other pursuits. Further, the system
lf tarra tenure and the laws of debt were such that not only did
the nobility hold the most land and the best land, but many "free"
men were compelled to serve as the necessa{y (but involuntary)
zr
labour force for the larger estates. As Aristotle wrote in his Constitution of Athens (II), "there was civil strife between the nobles
and the people for a long time" because "the poor, with their
wives and children, were enslaved to the rich" and "had no political rights."
Yet another factor was military. By a process we cannot trace
but for which there is evidence in vase-paintings soon after 7oo,
the Homeric warrior was replaced by the hoplite, the heavy-armed
infantryman who fought in massed formation. Hoplites were men
of some means, since they had to provide their own armour and
equipment but many came from the middle strata which were
outside the closed aristocracy and which, therefore, were a potential counter-weight in the political struggles.
COLONIZATION
For a considerable period a safety valve was provided by the misnamed "colonization" movement, which took off surplus (and
disafiected) sections of the population to new regions. Ancient accounts of this movement are remarkably unhelpful, with their
mythical elements and their emphasis on a few individuals and
their quarrels rather than on the broader social aspects. One
reasonably sober example, the story of the foundation of Syracuse
preserved by the geographer Strabo, who lived seven hundred years
after the event, reads like this (VI z, 4) :
"Archias, sailing from Corinth, founded Syracuse about the same
time that Naxos and Megara [also in Sicily] were established. They
say that when Myscellus and Archias went to Delphi to consult
the oracle, the god asked whether they preferred wealth or health.
Archias chose wealth and Myscellus health, and the oracle then
assigned Syracuse to the former to found and Croton
[in soutlrern
Italy] to the latter. . . . On his way to Sicily, Archias left a part
of the expedition.. . to settle the island now called Corcyra
[modem Corfu]. . . . The latter expelled the Liburni who oc-
r
Tyrants and Inwgivers
viduals often brought about struggles for power within their ranks,
exacerbating the troubles. Out of this civil strife, and aided by the
new military developments, there arose the specifically Greek institution of the tyrant. Originally a neutral word, "tyrant" signified
that a man seized and held power without legitimate constitutional
authority (unlike a king); it implied no judgment about his quality
as a person or ruler. Individual tyrants in fact varied very much:
some, Iike Peisistratus in Athens, reigned benevolently and well,
put an end to civil war, helped solve the economic problems, and
advanced their cities in many ways. But uncontrolled military
power was inherently an evil; if not in the first generation then in
the second or third the tyrants usually became what the word now
means.
Some cities escaped tyranny altogether, the most famous instance
being Sparta. She was in a unique position: having conquered and
:
l
TYRANTS AND LAWGIVERS
The hiving-ofi process failed to eliminate the difficulties at home.
"Redistribute the land and cancel debts" was the cry heard all over,
within a few generations even in some of the new settlements. Nor
was the aristocracy always united: factious and ambitious indi-
permanently subjugated the people of Laconia very early (no
doubt in the Dark Age), she then subjected Messenia to the same
treatment. Possessing very extensive and fertile lands and a large
sewile labour force (called "helots") in consequence, the Spartans
created a military-political organization without parallel, and they
were long immune from both the economic and the political
troubles characteristic of most archaic Greek states. Traditionally
this system was the work of a single "lawgiver," Lycurgus. Modern
scholars are not even agreed on whether such a man existed at all,
let alone on his date or what he actually did. Much of the tradition
about him cannot be right, and it seems corrupted beyond rescue.
It is a fact, but one which proves nothing one way or the other
about Lycurgus, that the lawgiver was not a rare figure in archaic
Greece-<ne thinks especially of Solon in early sixth-century
Athens, but also of lesser names such as Zaleucus and Charondas
among the western Greeks. The laws, constitutional, civil, sacral
and criminal, had to be fixed and codified if the community was to
emerge from its embryonic state in which a hand,ful of families
controlled all the resources and all the sanctions ("bribe-devouring
iudges," Hesiod called them). There were no precedents to fall
26
Archaic Greece
back on either, giving room for free invention as men tried to think
up ways by which a state could be administered, power distributed,
laws passed and enforced.
The lack of precedent can hardly be overstated; in whatever field
the archaic Greeks made new moves, no matter what the motive,
they rarely had models to imitate or improve upon. This situation
of compulsory originality, so to speak, is visible in many aspects of
their life: in the individualism of their lyric poetry; in their new
public architecture; in Hesiod-both the Hesiod of the Theogony
and the Hesiod of the works andDays-with his rare presumption
which led him (or them) to tamper with the traditions about hrs
gods and to judge the behaviour of his earthly rulers; in the sPeculative philosophers who began to inquire, again on their own authority and supported only by their own mental faculties, into the
nature of the universe; and in politics, where the originality is
more easily overlooked. In the instance of the lawgiver about whom
we knorv most, Solon, it was present in the very action which
brought him to that position. The Athenian class struggle had
reached an impasse and in 594 Solon wes chosen, by agreement,
charged with the task of reforming the state. That is the point: he
was chosen by the Athenians themselves, on their own initiative
and their own authority, because he was respected for his wisdom
and righteousness. He was not "called" and he had no vocation.
Nor did he seize Power
as a tYrant.
solon, like the other lawgivers, agreed that justice came from the
gods, of course, but he made no claim to a divine mission or even,
significant sense, to divine guidance' "I gave the common
itr
"tty such privilege as is sufficient," he wrote in one of his
people
po"*r. As to those in power, "I saw to it that they should sufier no
iniustice. I stood covering both parties with a strong shield, permitting neither to triumph unjustly." Superficially, there may seem
to be a resemblance with Hammurabi's preamble to his famous
code a thousand years earlier; the Babylonian monarch also said
,'to make
that his aim was
iustice to appear in the land, to destroy
the evil and the wicked that the strong might not oppress the
Tyrants and
l-,awgivers
27
weak." But the distinctions are far more important and consequential. In the first place, there is the secular quality of the Greek
codification, whereas Hammurabi acted in the name of the sods.
And then there is the decisive fact that the Eastern king regisrated
for subjects; the Greek lawgiver laid down rules by which the
community should govern itself. Having completed his work, in
fact, Solon left Athens for ten years so that the community
could test his programme without prejudice; his own great prestige, he feared, might otherwise weight the balance of judgment
unfairly.
In one sense Solon failed. He did not solve the economic difficulties lying behind the civil strife and after a generation tyranny,
which he sought to stave ofi, came to Athens. yet Solon remained
in the memory of later Athenians, regardless of party, as the man
who finally set them on the path to greatness. When Aristotle
summed up Solon's achievements in his brief account of the
Athenian constitution, he chose the following three as the most
crucial: abolition of enslavement for debt, creation of the right of
a third party to seek justice in court on behalf of an aggrieved
person and the introduction of appeals to a popular tribunal. All
three had one thing in common: they were steps designed to ad_
vance the community idea (and reality) by protecting the weaker
majority from the excessive and, so to speak, extra-legal power of
the nobility. Or, stated difierently, they stopped up loopholes in
the rule of law, an idea which was coming to be the Greek definition of civilized political organization; more than that, they were
steps towards equality before the law, which Athenians in the
classical period considered the central feature of democracy.
The role of the great Athenian tyrant Peisistratus in this development was paradoxical" By his very existence as tyrant he breached
the idea of rule by law. On the other hand, later writers generally
praised him, much as they condemned tyranny as an institutiou,
because, in actual practice, "he wished to govern according to the
laws without giving himself any prerogatives " (Aristotle, Constitution ol Athens XVI B). This cannot be accepted as literally true,
28
Archaic Gteece
'o?
but it is not simply untrue either. using different techniques, and
no doubt aoting from altogether different motives, Peisistratus
nevertheless carried Athens a very long way along the road solon
had sketched out. Himself a member of the nobility (he traced his
ancestry to Nestor, the Homeric king of Pylos), he refused to play
their game against the peasantry and the dispossessed' Indeed,
being'a tyrant, he could accomplish what Solon could not, and it
*^, io his reign that the peasantry finally obtained a reasonably
secure and independent position on the land, with financial assistance when required, that the civil strife was abated, and that
the political monopoly of the aristocratic families was broken once
all. Nobles continued to hold the leading civil and military
"r,dior
offices-as they did well into the next century under the democ-
fore tended to be #:,"*':^ii-?:iT"",otab1e
"*""p,;on
Sicily). But its historical significance cannot be judged
by its
duration, for tyranny was often the decisive feature in the transitional stage from the personal, familial rule of the nobility to the
classical city-state.
and the psychology were radically
altered. They were now, increasingly, servants of the state, instrujust as the
ments of the law, and not arbitraqy wielders of power;
common people were now genuinely free rnen, no longer threatThe two
ened with deLt bondage or with wholly partisan iustice.
were far from equals, but at least the difierences between
racy,
too-but the circumstances
factions
them had been reduced to a workable scale and proportion'
peisistratus was in F)wer from 545 (after one or two brief spells
before that) until his death in JzJt succeeded by his elder son
Hippias, who was expelled in 5ro. For thirty years this was a Peacef"i i"r", a time when Athens advanced rapidly in power and
wealth,andwhenthereweremanynewvisiblesignsofthisgrowth
and of the spirit of community-one might almost say "nationalism"-which accompanied it: in public works and in great religious
Hip
festivals particularln But in 5r4 Hippias's younger brother
by an embitterecl rival in a Iove afiair with
parchus i"s
"ssassirrated
despotism
yoorrg boy, and the tyranny quickly tumed into a crue1
"arrd was overthrown. In one way or another this story was repeated
in many Greek cities from the latter part of the seventh century to
not
the end of the sixth. Tyranny never sat so securely that it was
at
all'
reason
no
for
or
easily brutalized, becauie of some incident,
thereinstitution
arrd ihen the tyrant was usually thrown out. The
I
l
None of this was a matter of intention or design. No tyrant, not
even Peisistratus, saw himself as the bearer of the historic destiny
of the Greeks, as the forerunner of Athenian democracy or of anything else (nor did Solon, for that matter). They wanted power
and success, and if they were intelligent and disciplined, like
Peisistratus, they gained it by advancing their communities. Solon
may have thought that he "stood covering both parties with a
strong shield," but it was Peisistratus and Hippias who in fact had
the necessary strength. Solon was followed by a renewal of the
old civil war; Hippias, after a very short struggle lasting less than
two years, by a wholly new, democratic state.
That was in Athens. The development in other cities took other
lines: the unevenness of development already noticed was to rernain a feature of Greek history at all times. The most backward
regions, such as Aetolia or Acarnania, were scarcely afiected by
this whole trend, but they, by and large, counted for little an1n ,ay
(except as so much manpower available for war and piracy). Sparta
went its own way, the Sicilian cities theirs, each because of special
circumstances-the presence of a subjugated servile population or
the constant threat of an external power such as Carthage. Sometimes, as in Corinth, the nobility remained strong enough to impose an oligarchy for a very long time. And in much of Greece the
struggle between "the few" and "the many" (in their own phrasing) was never permanently stilled. Nevertheless, the generalization can be made that by the end of the archaic period, and in
particular wherever there had been a phase of tyranny, the form
of government, whether more democratic or more oligarchical, was
on a difterent level of political sophistication from anything that
had come before. This was the period in which some among t}re
Greeks achieved a workable compromise between the competing
L
30
Archaic Creece
and, historically speaking, often irreconcilable demands of social
obligation and personal freedom; in which, indeed, they may be
said to have discovered the idea of freedom, as distinct from the
personal, fundamentally asocial power of the Homeric chieftains,
the privilege of the aristocratic families, or the anarchy of the freebooters. The imperfections and the mistakes, both on the way and
in the final product, cannot diminish the achievement.
The new freedom and the new kind of community rested on
economic independence, for most men in agriculture, for the rest
in trade and manufacture or in the arts. Wherever debt bondage
and other ancient kinds of dependent labour were abolished, it was
necessary to turn to a new source, the chattel slave, whether cap-
tive Greek or, with increasing frequency, the barbarian. The sixth
century was the tuming point on this score also. The first indication we have of democratic institutions is in a fragmentary text
from the island of Chios, dated between ,75 and 55o. It was Chios,
too, which according to a confused but very insistent Greek tradition first began to buy slaves from the barbarians. This can scarcely
be very accurate history, but the symbolism is just right. After ali,
it was Athens which was to become the largest slaveholding state
in classical Greece. The final paradox, therefore, of archaic Greek
history is this march hand in hand of freedom and slavery.
THE COMMUNITY, RELIGION
AND PAN-HELLENISM
Then, as today, the visible external sign of all this growth in
prosperity and political maturity was the temple. The origins of the
Greek temple are lost in the Dark Age; neither wood nor sun-dried
brick leaves traces as a rule, and no temple in stone can be dated
with certainty before the seventh century. Then they began to
appear at an accelerated tempo, as technical skills ripened and,
even more important, as the power grew to mobilize the necessary
IV
THE CLASSICAL
CITY-STATE
Tnn Gnnrr wono polis (from which we derive such words as
"political") in its classical sense meant "a self-goveming state."
However, because the polis was always small in area and population, the long-standing convention has been to render it "citystate," a practice not without misleading implications. The biggest
of the poleis, Athens, was a very small state indbed by modern
standards-about rooo square miles, roughly equivalent to the
Duchy of Luxemburg or the state of Rhode Island-but to call it
a cifT-state gives a doubly wrong stress: it overlooks the rural
population, who were the majority of the citizen body, and it
suggests that the city ruled the cnuntry, which is inaccurate. And
Athens, in the extent and quality of its urbanization, stood at one
end of the Greek spectrum, together with a relatively small number of other states. At the other end were many which were not
cities at all, though they all possessed civic centres. When Sparta,
for example, in 385 defeated Mantinea, then the leading polis in
Arcadia, her terms were that the "city" be razed and the people
return to the villages in which they had once lived. It is clear from
j8
The Classical City-State
Xenophon's account that the hardship caused was only political
and psychological: the inhabitants of the "city" of Mantinea were
the owners of landed estates, who preferred to live together in the
centre, away from their farms, in a style visible as far back as the
Homeric poems and which had nothing else to do with city life.
How small the scale really was can best be indicated by a few
numbers, all of them estimates since no exact figures are available.
When the Athenian population was at its peak, at the outbreak
of the Peloponnesian War in 43r, the total, including men, women
and children, free and slave, was about z5o,ooo or perhaps z7j,ooo.
With the possible exception of Syracuse, which is not properly
comparable for various reasons, no other Greek polis ever approached that figure uniil the Roman period with its altogether
changed conditions. Corinth may have counted go,ooo, Thebes,
Argos, Corcyra and Acragas 4o,ooo to 6o,ooo each, and the rest
tailed oft, many to 5ooo and even fewer. Space was equally compact, again with the few exceptions that spoil most genenlizations-Sparta, which occupied Messenia, or Syracuse and Acragas,
which swailowed neighbouring territories in Sicily.
The Greeks themselves had no hesitation, however, in calling
Sparta or Syracuse a polis, the latter even though it was ruled by
tyrants during much of the classical period, when "11rrsnt" and
polis had come to have virtually contradictory connotations. Nor
did they deny the term to those backward regions in which political
organization and the civilization itself were still so rudimentary
that they were admittedly more like that of the lliad than like their
contemporaries. In the old days, wrote Thucydides (I 5), piracy by
Iand and sea was an honourable occupation among the Greeks as
among the barbarians, and "even today much of Hellas lives in the
ancient manner: the Ozolian Locrians and the Aetolians and
the Acarnanians and others in that part of the mainland." And of
course the word .polis did not distinguish the structure of government; it implied nothing about democracy or oligarchy or even
tyranny, any more than does "state."
L,oose as tJre usage may have been at times, it never passed be-
'j
1
1
i
The Classical City-Statn
jg
yond certain limits. Its furthest extension was to equate polis with
any independent Greek community (or one which had teurporarily
lost its independence). Polis was not applied to a league of states,
no matter how voluntary the alliance; nor to a district such as
Arcadia, which had a sort of autonomous (if abstract) existence,
held together by common myths, dialect and cult, but which was
not a political organism; nor, under any circumstances, to barbarian states. A11 these, in Greek eyes, were, each in its own way,
something essentially difierent from the true political community,
and size was no unimportant part of the difierence. They looked
upon their compactness in territory and numbers not as a mere
accident of history or geography but as a virtue. In Aristotle's words
(Politics VII r3z6b), "A state composed of too many . . . wili
not be a true polis because it can hardly have a true constitution.
Who can be the general of a mass so excessively large? And who
can be herald, except Stentor?" The polis was not a place, though
it occupied a defined territory; it was people acting in concert, and
therefore they must be able to assemble and deal with problems
face to face. That was a necessary condition, though not the only
one, of self-government.
Ideally, self-sufficiency was another condition of genuine independence. It was admitted that this could rarely be achieved, if
ever, because material resources were not evenly distributed (it is
enough to mention iron), but, within the limits imposed by nature,
much could be accomplished towards that obiective. How much
depended partly on size again-the polis must not be so small that
it lacked the manpower to carry on the various activities of a
civilized existence, including the requirements of defence. Given
adequate numbers, the problem was one of proper rules of conduct
of social life. And there agreement
and the Spartan answer were radianswer
stopped. The Athenian
cally difierent. Within Athens-using that city-state only as an
example-there was no single answer either, hence the long, complicated political debate which went on there.
and proper organization
That debate was conducted within a small closed circle inside
40
The Classical City-State
the total population, for the polis was an exclusive community. In
the middle of the fifth century the Athenians adopted a law re-
stricting citizenship to the legitimate children of marriages in
which both parents were themselves of citizen stock. This was an
extreme measure, probably neither rigidly enforced for very long
nor frequently repeated in other states, but the thinking behind it
was fairly typical. There had been a time, only two or three generations earlier, when Greek aristocrats often arranged marriages
for their children outside the community, sometimes even with
barbarians (but then only on the level of chieftains). Pericles was
a descendant in &e fourth generation of an external alliance, his
great-grandmother having been the daughter of the then tyrant of
Sicyon; while his political opponent Cimon was the grandson on
his mother's side of a Thracian king named Olorus. Now, under
Pericles, Athens declared all such marriages illegal, their offspring
bastards.
In a sense, the word "citizen" is too weak, though technically
correct; it does not*at least in our day-carry the full weight
implicit in being a member of a polis community. And if one were
not born into the community, it was nearly impossible to get in at
all. There was no routine naturalization procedure, not even in a
state like Athens which welcomed immigrants from other Greek
cities, gave them considerable freedom and opportunity, and accepted them socially. Only by formal action of the sovereign assembly could an outsider become a citizen of Athens, and the
evidence is that very special considerations were necessary before
the assembly could be persuaded. It was not enough, for example,
to have been born in Athens, to sewe in her armies, and to behave
decently and loyally, if one's parents were not citizens. Needless
to say, more xenophobic states were, if anything, even more closed
in. To open the doors wide was a sign of some deficiency, and it is
more than coincidental that by the end of the fourth century some
city-states were driven to sell citizenship in order to raise funds,
precisely in the period when the classical polis was a declining, not
to say dying, organism.
The Classical City-State
4r
In the more urban and more cosmopolitan city-states in particular, therefore, a minority constituted the community proper.
'[he majority included the non-citizens (the word "foreigners" is
best avoided since most of them were Greels), of whom the
permanent residents were called "metics" in Athens and some
other places; the slaves, a still more numerous class; and, in a
fundamental sense, all the women. Whatever their rights-and
that was entirely in the power of the state-they suffered various
disatrilities as comparcd with the citizens, and at the same time
they were fully subject to the authority of the stats in which they
resided. In that respect their position was no different from that
of the citizens, for in principle the power of the Greek polis was
total: it was the source of all rights and obligations and its authority reached into every sphere of human behaviour without exception. There were t}ings a Greek state customarily did not do, such
as provide higher education or control interest rates, but even then
its right to interfere was not in question. It merely chose not to.
-fhe polis was inescapable.
The question then arises, if the polis had such limitless authority, in what sense were the Greeks free men, as they believed
themselves to be? Up to a point their answer was given in the
epigram, "The law is king." Freedom was not equated with anarchy but with an ordered existence within a community which
was governed by an established code respected by all. That was
what had been fought for through much of the archaic period, first
against the traditional privilege and monopoly of power possessed
by the nobility, then against the unchecked power of the tyrants.
The fact that the community was t}re sole source of law was a
guarantee of freedom. On that all could agree, but the translation
of the principle into practice was another matter; it brought the
classical Greeks up against a difficulty which has persisted in political theory without firm resolution ever since. How free was the
community to alter its established laws? If the laws could be
changed at will, and that means by whichever faction or group
held a commanding position in the state at any given momen!
The Clnssical City-State
did that not amount to anarchy, to undermining the very stability
and certainty which were implicit in the doctrine that the law was
War and
42
king?
So put, the problem is too abstract. In real life the answer
normally depended on the interests of the respective protagonists.
The sixth century saw the emergence in many communities of the
common people as a political force, and against their demand for a
full share in government there was promptly raised the defence
of the sanctity of the law, of a code which, though it now recognized every citizen's right to a fair trial, to a minor share in govemment perhaps, even to the ballot, and to other undeniably new and
important features of social organization, nevertheless restricted
high civil and military office, and therefore policy-making, to men
of birth and wealth. Eunomia, the well-ordered state ruled by law,
had once been a revolutionary slogan; now it stood for the status
quo. The people replied with isonomia, equality of political rights,
and since the people were numerically in the majority, isonomia
led to demokratia. Whose law, in other words, was to be king?
The underlying trouble, of course, was that the sense of community, strong as it was, clashed with the gross inequality which
prevailed among the members. Poverty was widespread, the ma-
terial standard of life was low, and there was a deep cleavage
between the poor and the rich, as every Greek writer concerned
with politics knew and said. This has been common enough in all
history; what gave it an uncommon twist in Greece was the citystate, with its intimacy, its stress on the community and on the
freedom and dignity of the individual which went with membership. The citizen felt he had claims on the community, not merely
obligations to it, and if the regime did not satisfy him he was not
loath to do something about it-to get rid of it if he could. In consequence, the dividing line between politics and sedition (sfasis
the Greeks called it) was a thin one in classical Greecg and often
enough sfasis grew into ruthless civil war.
The classic description of extreme stasis is Thucydides' account
of the singularly brutal outbreak in Corcyra in 427, treated by the
Empire
4j
of this chronic evil in Greek society.
Nothing reveals the depths of the bitterness better than the fact
that both sides appealed to the slaves for support. Thucydides explained the phenomenon psychologically, as having its roots in
human nature. It was Aristotle who tied it more closely, and very
simply, to the nature and idea of the polis. "Speaking generally,"
he said in the Politics (V r3orb), "men turn to sfasis out of a
desire for equality." By its nature the polis awoke this desire, which
men then had difficulty in achieving. Hence the bitterness of factional strife, the comparative frequency and virulence of civil war.
There were exceptions, important ones-notably Athens and to a
degree Sparta-but the rough generalization may be made that in
the Greek .polis it was not so much policy which caused the most
serious divisions, but the question of who should rule, "the few"
or "the many." And always the question was complicated by extemal afiairs, by war and imperial ambitions.
historian explicitly
as a model
WAR AND EMPIRE
Because of their geographical situation the mainland Greeks
were for a loug time free from direct foreign pressure or attack. Not
so, however, the settlements to the east and west. Apart from frequent troubles with more primitive peoples, such as the Scythians
to the north or the Thracians to the west of the Black Sea, there
was the more serious matter of the powerful civilized empires. Iu
fuia Minor the Greek cities came under the suzerainty of the
Lydians in the sixth century, and then under the Persians. In Sicily
they were repeatedly invaded by Carthage, which maintained a toehold on the western end of the island but never succeeded in conquering the rest.*
Persian rule meant annual payment of tribute, which was sizable but in no sense crushing, passivity in foreign afiairs and
ecouomic and cultural freedom. Where Persia impinged most on
* Rome did not become a factor until about ?oo B.c.
The Classical City-State
tl-re internal life of the Greek states was in her backing of tyrants,
and this ultimately led to revolt, which broke out in 5oo or 4gg,
under circumstances which are far from clear. The Ionians immediately asked the mainland Greeks for help and received none,
except for twenty ships from the recently established Athenian
democracy and five more from Eretria in Euboea. Even so it took
Persia the better part of a decade to regain complete control, and
she followed up her success with two massive invasions of Greece
itself, the first in 49o sent by King Darius, the second in 4Bo
44
under his successor, Xerxes.
Many communities followed their refusal to help the Ionian
revolt by surrendering in fright to the inysfls15-"Medizers" they
were contemptuously called thereafter-and even the Delphic
oracle played an equivocal role, at best. The Spartans, backed by
the Peloponnesian League, had the only powerful army on the
Greek side, but partly because of difficulties at home, partly because of a false strategic conception, they were dilatory in defence,
though they proved what they could do, when tested, at Thermopylae and later at Plataea. It remained for Athens to deliver the
most significant blows, at Marathon in 49o and oft Salamis in 4Bo.
The latter was a most remarkable afiair: persuaded by Themistocles, the Athenians hurriedly enlarged their fleet, withdrew
from the city when the Persians came and allowed it to be destroyed, and then with their allies smashed the invaders in a great
sea battle. The power of Athens, and therefore the history of classical Greece, henceforth rested on control of the sea.
The Persians were badly beaten; they were far from crushed. It
was generally assumed that they would return for a third attempt
(that in the end they did not was largely the result of troubles
within their empire, which could not safely be forecast). Ordinary
prudence therefore required combined anticipatory measures, and
since they had to be taken in the Aegean and on the Asia Minor
coast, rather than on the Greek rnainland, it was natural that the
leadership should be given to Athens. A league was organized
under Athenian hegemony, with its administrative centre on the
War and EmPire
45
island of Delos (therefore historians call it the Delian League)'
Planned by the Athenian Aristeides on a system of contributions
either in ships and sailors or money, the League within a decade
or so cleared the Persian fleet from the Aegean. As the danger
lifted, the old desire for complete autonomy began to reassert
itself, but Athens would not allow withdrawal from the League
and forcibly put down any "revolt." So the League became an
empire, and the symbol of the change was the transfer of its headquarters and treasury in 4r4 from Delos to Athens. All but three
of the member states now contributed money and not ships, which
meant that Athens provided, manned and controlled virtually the
whole fleet herself. An indication of the magnitude of the annual
tribute is that it approximately equalled the Athenian public
revenue from internal sources.
For the next quarter-century the Athenian Empire was the most
important single fact in Greek afiairs, and Pericles was the dominant figure in Athenian afiairs. His policy was expansionist, though
highly controlled and disciplined. He greatly strengthened Athenian connexions in Thrace and southern Russia, which had strategic significance but were above all important as the main source
of Athens' vital corn imports; he made alliances with sicilian cities;
he tried, unsuccessfully, to attack EgyPt; he came to terms with
Persia. But Athenian relations with Sparta were increasingly difficult. Friendly at least in a formal way in the years following the
Persian wars, the two power blocks came into open conflict in the
fighting, and then returned to a state of
45os, with sorne actual
uneasy peace which lasted another two decades' Two major incidents involving Corinthian spheres of influence, at Corcyra and
Potidaea, then precipitated the Peloponnesian war, which lasted
with interruptions from 43r to 4o4, ending in the total defeat of
Athens and the dissolution of her empire. Corinth may have been
the chief advocate of war on the Spartan side, but, as the war's
historian Thucydides wrote (I 27,6), "The growth of the power
of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war
inevitable." Pericles probably thought so too, for he had been ac-
46
The Classical City-State
cumulating a large cash reserve, a most uncommon practice among
Greek states, which customarily spent ail their income quickly.
It seems to have taken Thucydides a rong time to make up his
mind about the underlfng cause of the peloponnesi"r, War; more
precisely, that there was a deep cause, as distinct from one or more
triggering i'cidents. This was one of rris bordest and most orieinar
conceptions. War, everyone recognized, was part of ]ife. plato
opened his last and longest work, the Lows, with praise of the
ancient "lawgiver" of crete for the way in which he prepared the
community for war, "since throughout life ail must foiever sustain
a war against all other poleis." This may be rhetorical exaggeration;
it is not Platonic irony. war was a normar instrument Jf poricy
which the Greeks used fully and frequently. They did not partic,rlarly seek war-the heroic ideals of the Homeric poems had bee'
thoroughly damped down-but neither did they go to lengths to
avoid it. In the fourth century, to be surg there were sie'sif wo,
weariness and even talk of a "common peace" within Hellas. Nothing came of this, however, and the individual states went right on
quarrelling, blaming others when war came and
iustifyinf their
own actions simply in terms of political necessity. The interests
of the state were always justification enough, whether of war or of
diplomacy and negotiation or of capituration (if necessary, even to
the Persians). Th. choice of instruments in any given situation
was arguable only on the question of tactics, pragmatically but not
morally.
The immediate causes of war were therefore as varied as the
policies and interests of the difierent states, as the objectives they
were pursuing at any given time. The desire for power and ag-
graudizement, border incidents, material enrichment through
booty (with human chattels high on the list), protection of co-*
supply and transport, the search for outside support for internal
faction-these all came into play, intensified by the fragmentation
of Hellas, which had the effect of multiplying the number of independent, or would-be independent, states rubbing against one
another. what was rare as a motive, however, was either trade, iu
War and
Empire
47
in the AngloDutch wars, for example; or territorial expansion, the direct incorporation of conquered land or its economic exploitation (other
than by the collection of tribute ) .
Both the casualness of armed hostility and the way in which
typical motives could be combined and at the same time create a
conflict of interests are nicely illustrated in one particular situation
in the Peloponnesian War. ln 426 the Spartans settled a colony,
for a number of reasons connected with the war, at Heraclea in
Trachis, near the sea, a few miles from the pass of Thermopylae.
The colony was in trouble at once because, Thucydides says
(III 93, z), "the Thessalians, who were in control of that area,
. . . feared that it would be a very powerful neighbour and they
continually harassed and made war upon the new settlers." The
Thessalians, a loose federation of tribes, were in fact allied with
Athens, yet Thucydides fails to give that as the ground for their
hostility to Heraclea. His reasons do not emerge for some pages,
until he comes to the year 424 and the campaigns of the Spartan
general Brasidas, who set out for the north with rToo hoplites to
carry the war into Thrace. Arriving in Heraclea, Brasidas "sent a
messenger to his friends in Pharsalus [a Thessalian town] asking
them to conduct him and his army through the territory." His
"friends" included a number of the leading oligarchs and they
did as he requested. "The majority of Thessalian citizens," Thucydides then explains (IV 78), "had always been favourable to the
the sense of a struggle over sea lanes and markets, as
Athenians. Had there been genuine constitutional government in
Thessaly rather than the customary rule by a narrow clique, Brasidas would never have been able to proceed." As it was, he rushed
through just in time, before the opposition was sufficiently mobilized to stop him. Thus it was the interests of internal faction
which decided policy, rather than the obligations of a formal external alliance. And there is no reason not to believe Thucydides
that the Thessalians made war against Heraclea simply because a
strong neighbour was someone to fear.
On the other hand, since war was a means and
not an end,
48
'War and
The Classical City-State
peaceful alternatives were also tried, and they did not always fail.
It was power, in the end, which was the strongest force for p""."_
earlier the power of the tyrants, now the power of a few great city_
states. Their superior ability to wage war was reinforced bv
a
general realization that they would do so promptly if required. By
itself no Greek state could generate that much power, but if one
were big enough to begin with, persistent enough, sufficiently unified and under competent leadership, it could create and wleld a
power block. Alliances were valuable above all because they provided the leading states with auxiliary manpower. And in the pregunpowder world, it was usually the weight of properly trained and
backward areas, where the polis never came to life; or to the isolated
and complicated instance of the Boeotian l,eague, in which one
powerful member, Thebes, sought domination in her own interesf
and paid {or her insistence by having to fight her neighbours over
and over again.
The Boeotian kague exposed the thinness of the line that
separated allies from subiects, but it was the Athenian Empire,
with an efiective membenhip of more than r5o states in Asia
Minor, the Hellespontine region, Thrace and the Aegean islands,
which brought that issue to a head in classical Greece. After 454
there was no pretence about it: membership was compulsory and
secession prohibited; members paid an annual cash tribute which
was fixed, collected and spent by Athens at her sole discretion;
these imperial resources enabled Athens to conduct a complicated
foreign policy, which she alone determined; and there was a grow-
re_
sult of simple arithmetic. Towards the end of the sixth century, for
example, Sparta succeeded in bringing under alliance most of the
free states of the Peloponnese. Some needed pressure, others did
not, but who could say that the latter were more willing rather
than just more cautiously calculating? Thereafter war among the
Peloponnesian states was very rare indeed, until rheber r-"rh.d
Spartan power in 37t. That blow at once proved to be a mixed
blessing even to those who detested Sparta: it brought about the
emancipation of the Messenian helots, but it also led to a holo
caust of stasrs and petty warfare all over the peninsula. The sums
had been changed, so to speak, and war therefore returned, occupying the newly created power vacuum.
What modem historians call the Peloponnesian League was
known to contemporaries by the more awkward, but revealing,
name of "sparta and her allies." The point is that there was L
network of treaties tying each of the "member states" to sparta,
and only the loosest sort of league organization under the hegem_
ony of Sparta. This was a significant distinction, preserving the
individual state's image of its autonomy. In an arliance it could
pretend to be an equal, still a fully independent entity retaining
its sovereign freedom of action; in a league it could be outvoted
and lose control over its own actions. The rearity did not coincide
ing tendency for the Athenians to interfere in the internal affairs
of the member states, in particular to support and strengthen
democratic elements against their oligarchic opponents. Some
contemporaries began to refer to the "tyrant cityr" a reproach
which is readily repeated by historians today, chiefly on the authority of Thucydides. Yet that is far too one-sided a judgment; it
looks only at the question of polis autonomy and ignores other, by
no means meaningless, desires and values. Thucydides himself
noted the friendliness to Athens among the majority of citizens in
Thessaly, and the evidence suggests that the same was widely true
among communities in the Empire. In the unending struggle between the few and the many, Athens usually came down on the
l
b-.
49
with the image, of course: states were rarely equals and bargaining
between them was rarely free, and on the other hand even Sparta
could not efiectively mobilize the support of her allies without
consulting them and obtaining their approval of the proposed
course of action. Nevertheless, the myth of independence was so
compelling that genuine leagues in Greek history were restricted
either to the amphictyonies, which organized and shared control
of ccrtain pan-Hellenic shrines such as Delphi; or to the most
equipped men which decided battles; among the Greeks, the
heavy-armed hoplite infantry. partly, therefore, peace was the
Empire
The Cl.assical City-State
side of the many, who often needed such aid to maintain their
position, and who therefore felt that tribute and some loss of
autonomy were a price well worth paying in return for democratic
government at home and peace abroad.
The decisive test came in the Peloponnesian War, in which few
Greek states escaped some involvement except those on the outermost fringes of Hellas. This was a war quite without precedent in
every respect, in the number of participants (both numbers of
states and numbers of men), in its duration and therefore in the
expenditure of resources and in the pressure on morale, in the
crucial importance of sea power, and in the way in which the scene
of actual fighting moved all over the place, from Asia Minor to
Sicily, often in several widely dispersed areas simultaneously. It
50
was a war which had therefore to be played by ear, as neither states-
men nor commanders had adequate precedents from which to
learn. Ever since the invention of the massed hoplite formation,
Greek wars were customarily shortJived aftairs in the summer
months, culminating in a single infantry engagement between the
heavy armour on both sides, numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Eventually one side or the other broke and fled, and the
battle-and usually the war-was over. The enemy was also
harassed by raiding of crops, occasionally by a siege, usually unsuccessful unless treason took over, or by cavalry movements-but
the encounter of the hoplites was normally the one decisive action"
Hence there was no occasion for deep strategy, little need for
financial preparations, nothing that one could seriously call logistics.
But these were wars between single states, with or without the
support of a handful of allies, having an obvious battle terrain in
which to contend. The Peloponnesian War involved great blocks
of states and a wide choice of battle areas with little chance for a
decision so long as the two centres, Sparta and Athens, remained
intact.
It was Pericles' idea not to risk a decision
on the hoplite
engagement, even at the expense of allowing the Spartans to raid
Attica repeatedly without resistance. He counted on Athenian fi-
War and EmPire
5L
nancial resources, on her peerless navy, and on her intangible
psychological superiority. In a word, he had a strategic idea, if not
a plan, of considerable complexity, and its foundation was the
solidity of the Empire. He was not wrong. Whatever the explanation for the ultimate defeat of Athens, it was not eagerness in the
Empire to be released from the Athenian yoke. Naturally enough,
both sides found in the course of twenty-seven years a very considerable unevenness in the reliability of their allies, and both
sides did what they could to unhinge the alliances, using force,
caiolement and, most effective of all, support for sfasis. Brasidas
was not alone in having "friends" in the allied states of the other
camp. The important thing about the Athenian Empire is not that
there were defections but that so much support continued to come
to the "tyrant city," even in the final decade when all seemed lost
and one rnight have expected elementary raison d'6tat to dnve
her subjects to a quick bargain with the enemy.
In truth there is no simple and obvious explanation why Athens
lost, aud it is necessary to remember that she almost escaped. The
peace of 42r was a victory in the restricted sense that not one of
the main Spartan objectives was achieved. Then came the renewal
of the war, and in 41 5 the Athenians decided on a maior stroke, the
invasion of Sicily. It ended in a complete disaster, and though the
war dragged on for another nine years, that defeat was clearly the
turning point. Yet it was a defeat by a hair's breadth; more
competent leadenhip would almost certainly have turned the
invasion into a success, with consequences that cannot be realistically guessed at, though they surely should not be underestimated.
This failure of leadership, it is widely held on the inevitable
authority of Thucydides, was symptomatic of a very deep and general decline in Athenian political behaviour after the death of
Pericles in the second year of the war, and that is probably the
commonest explanation of Athens' defeat. Perhaps, but it is at
least arguable that this was a war Athens could iose but could not
really win, simply because-given its size, its resources in men
and materials, the incapacity of its rudimentary economy and
The Classical CitY-State
technology to expand, and the incapacity of the Greeks either to
transcend the polis or, in most instances, to live at peace with
themselves within it-final victory would have come to Athens
only if she succeeded in bringing all Hellas within her Empire,
Sz
and that was apparently beyond reachThe war ended in 4o4 and the most important condition laid
down by the victorious Spartans was the dissolution of the Empire'
The war was therefore a disaster not only for Athens but for all
Greece: it disrupted the one possible road towards some kind of
political unification, though admittedly a unity imposed on others
Ly an ambitious city. Sparta fought the war under the slogan of
restoring to the Greek cities their freedom and autonomy, and she
honoured that aim first by eftectively returning the Asia Minor
Greeks to Persian suzerainty (in payment for Persian gold, without which she was unable to bring the war to a close); then by
attempting to establish a tribute-paying empire of her own, with
military governors and garrisons, on the corpse of the Athenian
Empire. That incompetent eftort did not last a decade. In the
fourth century the power vacuum in Greece became a permanent
condition, despite the eftorts of Sparta, Thebes and Athens in
turn to assert some sort of hegemony. The final answer was given
by no Greek state but by Macedon under Philip II and his son
Alexander.
ATHENS
has been estimated that one-third or slightly more of the
citizens of Athens lived in the urban districts at the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War in 43r, a proportion which a century later had
risen to perhaps one-half" The free non-citizens, barred by law
frsm owning land, were concentrated in the city and the harbour
town. So were many of the slaves. The purely demographic consequence was that Athens and the Piraeus were each more
populous than a maiority of Greek states taken whole. This urban
It
Athens
5j
quality of Athenian life was of the greatest importance, a necessaqy
condition for the power and much of the glory of the state.
Nevertheless, the tenacity of the attachment to the soil must not
be overlooked. The urban dwellers included no small number
whose economic interest, in whole or in part, remained in the land.
There is evidence that even at the end of the fifth century threefourths of the citizen families owned some landed property, though
not always enough for a livelihood. Of these it would be the
wealthier, in particular, who resided in the city. As for the countqymen proper, when they were all brought behind the walls in the
sumrrer of 43t, in anticipation of the first of the Spartan incursions, "they were depressed," Thucydides reports (II 16, z),"and
they bore with bittemess having to leave their homes and hereditary shrines."
In the city were some hundreds of families of outstanding
wealth: citizens living on the income from their estates and, occasionally, on investment in slaves; non-citizens whose economic
base was trade or manufacture or money-lending. Among both
groups there were men who were very rich indeed. Pericles' chief
political opponent in his earlier years was Cimon, a member of
one of the greatest of the old aristocratic families, and he, according to Aristotle (Corctitution of Athens XXVII 3), "possessed
the fortune of a tyrant, . . . supported many of his fellow demesmen, every one of whom was free to come daily and receive from
him enough for his sustenance. Besides, none of his estates was
enclosed, so that anyoue who wished could take from its fruits."
Or there was Nicias, commander of the army destroyed in Sicily,
who is reported to have owned a thousand slaves; or the man,
whose very name is unknown, who itemized in court his personal
contributions to the navy and to the cost of public festivals in the
final seven years of the Peloponnesian War, totalling nearly eleven
talents, the equivalent of a year's wages for well over two hundred
skilled workmen.
Such men were essentially rentiers, free to devote themselves to
politics or leaming or plain idling. This was as true of Nicias as of
The Classical City-State
Athens
the absentee landlords, for Nicias did not employ his slaves directly
but hired them out on a per-diem rental to entrepreneurs holding
concessions in the silver mines at Laurium. Even those who, like
Cleon, made use of their slaves in their own industrial establishments and therefore cannot be called rentiers in a strict sense were
(or at least could be if they wished) no less men of leisure; their
businesses were managed in the same fashion as were large landed
estates, by slave bailifis or foremen. The exact number of slaves
in Athens is in dispute; it may be doubted if any contemporary
could have given the figure, in the absence of either a register or a
periodic census. Probably 6qooo to 8o,ooo is a fair estimate, which
government (broadly defined) and in the rich festival activity associated with the cults of the state. How these exceptional pattems
of behaviour came into being is one of the central questions in
Athenian history.
Part of the answer can be found in the distribution of the military burdens and obligations.'When the war with Sparta became a
fact, Pericles personally led a great invasion-more properly it can
be called a demonstration or parade-into the territory of Megara
with r3,ooo hoplites, lo,ooo of them citizens, the rest metics' Another 3ooo were at that moment engaged in the siege of Potidaea,
and the evidence suggests that the two groups together made up
54
is about the same proportion of the total population of the state
as prevailed in the American South before the Civil War. The
heaviest concentrations were in the mines and in domestic service,
the latter a broad category including thousands of unproductive
men and women retained by men of means because it was the
thing to do. Plato, for example, mentioned five domestics in his
will, Aristotle more than fourteen, his successor, Theophrastus,
seven. In agriculture and manufacture the slaves were fewer in
number, and they were outnumbered iu these branches of the
economy by the free peasants and probably also by the free, independent craftsmen. Nevertheless it was in these productive areas
that the significance of slaves was perhaps the greatest, because
they released from any economic concern, or even activity, the men
who gave political leadership to the state, and in large measure the
intellectual leadership as well.
The overwhelming mass of the Athenians, whether they owned
a slave or two apiece or not, found themselves largely occupied
with procuring a livelihood, and many never rose above the minimum standard. There were many poor families in the countryside,
and there were probably even more in the town. Nevertheless, in
the classical period Athens remained free from the chronic Greek
troubles arising out of a depressed and often dispossessed peasantry.
Furthermore, even the poor often found both time and the oppor-
tunity to participate in the public life of the community, both in
55
the full hoplite force in 4)r, ot very nearly so. (Army figures cited
by a writer such as Thucydides, unlike general population figures,
are apt to be accurate: Greek states conducted no censuses, but for
obvious reasons they kept reliable registers of their amed forces,
and these could be consulted by any citizen in a state such as
Athens.) The total number of adult male citizens at that time was
of the order of 4o,ooo to 45,ooo; therefore about one-third of the
citizens (ignoring the metics in this calculation) had sufficient
means to be classed as hoplites. Granted that those iust above the
minimum qualification may have found this a hardship, as those
good fortune for their
iust below might well have thanked their
narrow escape, the proportion still offers a useful indication of
the spread of wealth in the state.
Every citizen and metic was liable for military service, the size
of any given levy being determined by the Assembly' Most commonly, however, only the hoplites and cavalry, that is, the two
wealthier sectors, were called out. They were required to provide
and maintain their own equipment, and they received from the
state nothing more than a per-diem allowance while on duty (in
the fourth century, when the treasury could not stand the strain,
often not even that). Although the so-called light-armed levies
were occasionally summoned to duty, it remains accurate to say
that in Athens the army, conscript and not professional in any
modern sense, was strictly an uPPeI- and middle-class institution.
The Classical CitY'State
The navy, in contrast, was altogether difierent, and differently
organized. Command of the vessels was distributed among the
richer citizens, who were also responsible for a considerable share
of the operating costs, while the crews were paid professionals.
Much of the detail remains ve{y obscure, but it seems probable
56
that some r2,ooo men were so engaged normally up to eight months
in the year. Although the citizen-body could not have supplied anything like that number, there were enough citizens to constitute a
very significant element. For the urban poor the navy was a most
important source of livelihood, at least while the Athenian Empire
existed, a fact which was perfectly visible to every contemporaryr
as were its political implications. "It is the demos," wrote an
anonymous fifth-century pamphleteer commonly and too amiably
referied to as the Old Oligarch, "which drives the boats and gives
the state its strength."
Now demos was a word with a complicated history' The Old
oligarch used it in its sense of the "common people," the "lower
claslses," with the peiorative overtones ProPer to all right-thinking
men as far back as the lliod. Bfi demos also meant the "people
as a whole"; in a democracy, the citizen-body who acted through
its assembly. Hence decrees of the Athenian Assembly were passed,
in the officiat tranguage of the documents, "by the demos" rather
than "by the ecilesia" (the Greek word for "assembly")' The
Assembly met frequently-at least four times in every thirty-sixday period in the fourth century and perhaps as often in the fifth
every male citizen who had reached his eighteenth blrthday
-""a
was eligible to attend whenever he chose, barring a few who had
lost their civic rights for one ofience or another. obviously a mele
fraction of the forty thousand came, but those who were present
meeting were the demns on that occasion, and their
at any single
-recogrri"ed,
in law, as the actions of the whole people.
acts were
Then, by a curious extensiou of this principle, it was held that the
jury-courts, selected by lot from a panel of six thousand men' vol.r"i""r, from among all the citizens, were also equal to the whole
demos in matters which fell within their competence'
Athens
>l
Direct participation was the key to Athenian democracy: there
was neither representation nor a civil service or bureaucracy in any
significant sense. In the sovereign Assembly, whose authority was
esentially total, every citizen not only was entitled to attend as
often as Le pleased, but also had the right to enter the debate,
ofier amendments and vote on the proposals, on war and peace,
taxation, cult regulation, afiny levies, war finance, public works,
treaties and diplomatic negotiations, and anything else, maior or
minor, which required governmental decision' Much of the preparatory work for these meetings was done by the boule, a council
Lf fiu" hundred chosen by lot for one year-and again everyone
was eligible, save that no man could be a member more than
twice in his lifetime. Then there wete a large number of officials,
of varying importance, most of them also designated by lot for one
y""r, ih" f"* exceptions included the ten generals (strategoi) who
were elected and could be re-elected without limit, and temporary
ad hoc commissions for diplomatic negotiation and the like. There
was no hierarchy among the offices; regardless of the significance
or insignificance of any post, every holder was Iesponsible directly
arrd solely ,to the demos itself, in the council or the Assembly or
the courts, and not to a superior officeholder'
This system was of cou$e the product of a considerable evolution, completed in its essentials by the third quarter of the fifth
century but subject to further modification as long as Athens re*ainei a democracy. The Athenians sometimes called Solon the
father of their democracy, but t}at was an anachronistic myth.
Although both Solon and Peisistratus in difterent ways laid some
of the groundwork by weakening the archaic system, especially the
politica'l monopoly of the aristocratic families, neither man, it need
irardly be said, had democracy in view' The change, when it came,
*", ,-hnrp and sudden, followiug the overthrow of the tyranny in
a twoyear civil war which ensued; and
5ro wittrspartan help, and
ihe architect of the new type of government was Cleisthenes, a
member of the noble family of the Alcmaeonids. Cleisthenes was
no theorist and he seems to have become a democrat virtually by
58
The Classical CitY'State
accident, turning to the common people when he urgently needed
their support in the confused struggle to fill the vacuum left by
the deposed tyrant, Hippias, the son of Peisistratus. We are too ill
informed to say how much of a model for his new set-up Cleisthe-
to find elsewhere in Greece, in Chios for example, but
the final result was in any case original in the best Greek sense.
Having committed himself to a maior innovation, Cleisthenes with
his advisers, whoever they may have been, created the institutions
which they thought their new obiective required, retaining what
they could, but not hesitating to demolish and to invent boldly
nes was able
and radically.
The Cleisthenic structure was not yet the Periclean: two full
generations were required to perfect the system, a period which
included not only the Persian Wars and the building of the
Empire, but also much internal conflict, for the forces opposed to
democracy were far from crushed in 5o8. The details of that struggle can no longer be retraced with any clarity; of all the gaps in
our knowledge of classicai Greek history this is perhaps the most
frustrating. The man who played the decisive role between Cleisthenes and Pericles was Ephialtes, and we know next to nothing
about him or his career. He was assassinated in 462 ot 46r, a political crime which passed almost unnoticed in Greek literature, and
that silence is sufficient commentary on the tendentiousness of
Greek writers, a one-sidedness with which the modern historian
must grapple all the time, and never more than in the study of the
history and functioning of the Athenian democracy'
In the end the pivotal mechanisms were election by lot, which
translated equality of opportunity from an ideal to a reality; and
pay for office, which permitted the poor man to sit on the Council
and iury-courts or to hold office when the lot fell to him. It was
not without reason that Pericles could boast, according to Thucydides, that it was one of the positive peculiarities of Athens that
poverty was no bar to public service. When one adds up the
Assembly, the council, the courts and the large number of rotating offices, the total-several thousands-indicates a direct par-
Athens
59
ticipation in the work of government widely shared among the
citizen-body, an uncommon degree of political experience cutting
right across the class structure. The distribution was, of course, not
an even one: that would have been too utopian. In particular, the
rural population was probably under-represented in ordinary circumstances, and at the top, among the men who gave the leadership and formulated policy, very few are known (and they not
before the fourth century) to have come from the lower classes.
In a sense, amateurism was implicit in the Athenian "definition"
of a direct democracy. Every citizen was held to be qualified to
share in government by the mere fact of his citizenship, and his
chances to play a part were much intensified not only by the wide
use of the lot but also by the compulsory rotation in the Council
and most offices. Though the pay was sufficient to compensate a
man for the wages he might have lost as a craftsman or labourer,
it was no higher than that. Hence no man could count on officeholding as a regular livelihood, or even as a better one for some
periods of his life. At the same time, a large state like Athens,
with its Empire and its (by Greek standards) complex fiscal, naval
and diplomatic afiairs, absolutely needed full-time politicians to
guide and coordinate the work of the more or less temporary
amateur participants. And it found them among the men of wealth,
the rentierc who were free to devote themselves wholly to public
afiairs. Down to the Peloponnesian War these men were ap
parently drawn entirely from the old landed families. Then new
men broke their monopoly-Cleon, Cleophon, Anytus-whose
leisure was provided by slave craftsmen, and for the remaining
century of democratic government in Athens the balance of leadership perhaps leaned more on that side, punctuated occasionally by
really poor men who worked their way to the top, not without
incurring suspicion that monetary comrption played some part in
their rise.
It became increasingly common to refer to these men as "orators," almost as a technical term and not just as a description
of their particular abilities in that direction. Because the Assembly
The Classical CitY-State
alone made policy and held control, in coniunction with the
courts, not only over the affairs of state but also over all officials,
military or civil, leadership of the state lay in the Assembly' It
met in the open, on a hill near the Acropolis called the Pnyx,
wl-rere thousands gathered (iust how many thousands is another
frustrating unknown) to debate and decide. The Assembly, in a
word, was a mass meeting, and to address it required, in the
strictest sense, the power of oratory. Because it had no fixed composition, because no one was chosen to attend, it had no political
parties or "government," nor any other principle of organization.
The president for the day was chosen by lot from the members of
the iouncil on the usual scheme of rotation, motions were made,
argued and amended, and the vote was taken, all in a single
sitling, except in rare circumstances. Anyone who sought to guide
it in its policy-making had to appear on the Pnyx and present his
60
reasons. Neither the holding of office nor a seat on the Council was
a substitute. A man was a leader so long, and only so long, as the
Assembly accepted his programme
opponents.
in
preference
to those of his
Ancient critics and their modern followers have not been sparing in their condemnation: after Pericles, they say, the new type
of leader was a demagogue, pandering to the demos in the Assembly and the courts, a,t the expense of the higher interests of
the siate. No doubt not all the men who achieved political
eminence in Athens were selfless altruists, and mass meetings on
the scale of those on the Pnyx obviously invited emotional and
even inflammatory speech-making. It would be odd, however, if
dishonest politicians and excessive rhetoric were wholly unknown
in the earlier years of the democracy, then to come on with a rush
when Pericles died. Besides, there is enough evidence to suggest
that the over-all record and achievement of the Assembly remained credible to the end. It is a fact that the state often followed a consistent line for rather long periods, in each instance identified with one individual or a small group. For ail their experience,
most citizens were unable to cope with the intricacies of finance
Athens
6r
or foreign afiairs and tended, quite rightly, to give their support to
those full-time politicians whom they trusted (and whom they
could always check). Hence not only Pericles in the fifth century
and Demosthenes late in the fourth were permitted to develop
long-term policies, but also less famous though far from untalented
men such as Thrasybulus or Eubulus in the intervening years.
It is also a fact that Athens nevet ran short of men of the
highest ability who were willing to devote themselves to politics,
though the rewards were largely honorific and the personal risks
considerable. Conflict was often sharp, and the issues were serious,
and not iust shadow-boxing for prestige or personal status. The
long struggle to anchor the democracy itself, the growth of the
Empire, the Peloponnesian War and its strategy, public finance,
and finally the question of Philip and Alexander-these were
matters worthy of passion. And they were fought with passion.
Whoever aspired to leadership could not do otherwise, and in a
system lacking the buttressing and mediating institutions of party
and bureaucracy, such men lived under constant tension. It is not
surprising that they sometimes reacted violently, that they seized
the occasion to crush an opponent; or that the demos was some-
times impatient with failure, real or imaginary. There was no
immunity from the risks: even Pericles suffered temporary eclipse
and a heavy fine early in the Peloponnesian War. Others were
ostracized, sent into a kind of honorary exile for ten years, but
without loss of property and without social disgrace. When ostracism was dropped as a practice near the end of the 6fth century, ordinary exile on "criminal charges" remained as a possibility.
And a very few met death, legally or by assassination.
One could easily compile a catalogue of the cases of repression,
rycophancy, irrational behaviour and outright brutality in the
nearly two centuries that Athens was governed as a democracy.
Yet they remain no more than so many single incidents in this
long stretch of time when Athens was remarkably free from the
universal Greek malady of sedition and civil war. Twice there were
oligarchic coups, in 4rr and 4o4, but they were short-lived, came
6z
Sparta
The Classical City-State
under the severe stress of a war that was being lost, and the second
time succeeded for a few months only because of the intewention
of the victorious spartan army. Thereafter no more is heard of
oligarchy in Athens (outside the writings of some philosophers)
uniil another invader, the Macedonians, closed this cl-rapter of
Greek history completely in 3zz. Not a few of the supporters of
the 4o4 coup-known thereafter by the deservedly malodorous
,r"*" oi the Thirty Tyrants-had been active in the oligarchy of
4rr. That they lived to play their seditious role twice in a decade
is not unworthy of note. Indeed, even so staunch a libertarian
as fohn Stuart Mill thought this was perhaps too much. "The
Athenian Many," he wrote, "of whose democratic irritability and
suspicion we hear so much, are rather to be accused of too easy
and good-natured a confidence, when we reflect that they had living in the midst of them the very men who, on the first show of
an opportunity, were ready to comPass the subversion of the
democracy."
By the middle of the fifth century the "few" and the "many"
among the Athenian citizens had established a satisfactory work
ing balance, which is but another way of saying that they had
achieved a system which was virtually stasis-proof. For the "many"
the state provided both significant material benefits and a very
considerable share in governrnent, for the "fs1ry"-2nfl they were
a fairly numerous class-the honours and satisfactions that went
with political and military leadership. Political success and economic prosperity served as unifying factors, making it possible to
meet the enornous costs of office and the fleet, without which the
participation, and even the loyalty, of thousands of the poorest
citizens would have been uncertain at best; and providing powerful psychological stimuli to civic pride and close personal identification with the potis. Without the Empire it is hard to imagine
the initial triumph of the system trphialtes and Pericles forged.
Then the system generated its own momentum, sustained by an
active sense of civic responsibility-so that the wealthy, for example, carried a heavy burden of financial charges and the main
67
military burden, while the demos accepted leadership from their
ranks-and not even the disasters of the Peloponnesian War or
the loss of the Empire seriously threatened the structure of government. Fourth-century Athens found resources within herself
to maintain the political and civic organization which the Empire
had helped erect in the previous century.
Athens prospered as did no other classical Greek state. The
greatest of her boasts, attributed to Pericles, was that she was the
"school of Hellas." In two centuries she produced an incredible
succession of superb writers and artists, scientists and philosophers.
Many who were not native, furthermore, were powerfully attracted to the city, and some of them settled there more or less
permanently. There were not many important figures in Greek
cultural life between the years 5oo and 3oo who were not associated with Athens for at least part of their careers, including
some of the bitterest critics of her system. None was more severe
than Plato, a native Athenian who found much to admire in the
state often held up as her ideal opposite, namely, Sparta. He and
those who thought like him conveniently forgot that in Sparta
they would never even have begun to think, let alone been permitted to teach freely as they did.
SPARTA
It
has been said that Sparta had two separate histories, its
own and that of its image abroad (or 'mirage" as one French
scholar calls it). Considering how much was written about Sparta
in antiquity, it is remarkable how confused, contradictory and incomplete the picture is. Partly this is because the mirage is constantly cutting across the reality, distorting it and often concealing
it altogether; and partly because the Spartans themselves were
so completely silent. There was a time, in the archaic period, when
Sparta played a leading part in the development of the main lines
of Greek civilization: in poetry as we know from the bits that
64
The Classical CitY'State
still exist; in music, according to reliable ancient traditions; even,
it seems, in seafaring and in creating some of the germinal institutions of the city-state. After about 6oq however, there was an
apparently abrupt break. From then on not a single Spartan citizen
is remembered for any cultural activity. Their famed "laconic
speech" was a mark that they had nothing to say' the final consequence of the peculiar way of life they had brought to completion by this time.
In population Sparta did not rank with the bigger states. The
of Spartans ever to engage in battle, so far as we
know, were the 5ooo at Plataea in 4Tg.Thereafter they declined
steadily, until in the mid-fourth century they could not muster
looo men. That figure is cited by Aristotle as a symptom of the
defectiveness of their system, for, he argued, the tenitoqy under
their control could support r5oo cavalry and ro,ooo infantry' By
conquest Sparta held the districts of Laconia and Messenia, quite
fertile by Greek standards, giving her access to the sea and sup
plying that rare and invaluable natural resource' iron (a fitting
counteqpart to the Athenian silver). What this territory supported
was not a free population but subject peoples of two kinds' The
helots were in outright sewitude, a compulsory labour force working the land for the Spartans. Their number cannot even be
guessed, but it was certainly many times that of the Spartans
largest number
ihemselves. The others, known as peioeci, retained their personal
freedom and their own community organization in return for
surrendering all right of action to sparta in the military and foreign
fields.
Thus restricted, the communities of the petioeci were, strictly
speaking, incomplete poleis;yet there is no sign that they struggled
to free themselves from spartan authority in the way the smaller
Boeotian states persistently battled Theban efforts to establish an
overlordship. No doubt resignation was the only prudent course,
but other considerations were also present: peace, protection and
economic advantage. It was the perioeci who managed the trade
and industrial production for Spartan needs, and it was they who
Spa*a
65
maintained Laconian ware on a respectable, and sometimes high,
level of craftsmanship and artistry. The helots were an altogether
difierent matter. The usual practice throughout most of antiquity,
when a city or district was enslaved, was to sell ofi the inhabitants
and disperse them. The Spartans, however, had adopted the
dangerous alternative of keeping them in subiugation at home,
in their native territory-and they paid the price. Whereas Greek
history was astonishingly free from slave revolts, even where there
were large concentrations as in the Attic silver mines, helot revolts were always smouldering and occasionally burst out in full
flaming force.
What kept the helots enslaved and prevented siill more frequent rebellion was the emergence of Sparta as an armed camp,
a development to which the key iay in Messenia, conquered later
than l,aconia and much more thoroughly reduced (so much so that
this district remained virtually empty of the great architectural
works which everywhere else were the visible marks of Hellenism).
Soon after the middle of the seventh century the Messenian helots
revolted: tradition calls that conflict the second Messenian war
and gives it a duration of no less than seventeen years- The
Messenians were finally crushed, and the lesson they taught was
translated into a thorough social and constitutional reform, the
establishment in its final form of the Spartan system, and ultimately of the spartan mirage. Henceforth the Spartan citizenbody was a professional soldiery, bred from childhood for two
qualities, military skill and absolute obedience, free from (indeed,
barred from) all other vocational interests and activities, living a
barrack life, always ready to take the field in strength against any
foe. whether helot or outsider. Its needs were met by the helots
and the perioeci; its training was provided by the state; its obedience was secured by education and by a set of laws which tried to
prevent economic inequality aud any form of gainful pursuit.
The whole system was closed in against outside influence, against
outsiders in person and even against imported goods. No state
could match Sparta in its exclusiveness or its xenophobia.
66
The Classical CitY'State
The governmental structure was often praised in antiquity for
its "mixed" character, supposedly providing a balance between
heredmonarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements. The two
members
were
and
field
in
the
armies
itary kings commanded the
of hr" douncil of Elders, the others, twenty-eight in number'
being elected for life from among the citizens over sixty years of
"lfh"
Assembly iucluded everyone' but its role seems to have
nor
b*een a rather passive one: it could neither initiate action
vote
or
amend proposals submitted to it; it could only aPProve
them down; and one may wonder how much independence of
"g".
judgment was exercised by a body of men for whom strict military
obJierrce was the paramount virtue' Most powerfui of all were
had a
the five ephors, elecied annually from all the citizens. They
as
well
as
state,
of
the
afiairs
general sopewisory position over the
important judicial functions.
Spa.tan discipline and Spartan military prcwess-the Spartans
*"," , professional army in a world of citizen militias and mercenary La.tds-elevated Sparta into a maior power' far beyond
what her size would otherwise have warranted. Her first and only
unwaveringconcernwasPeaceathomeinthePeloponnese.This
the
she never lully achieved, but she came near enough through
instrumentatity of the Peloponnesian League' The League gave
Sparta military assistance, and it was this help, together with
in
armies from amon g the perioeci, which built her strength'
numerical terms, to major proportions' In the sixth century Sparta
on
became beyond question the greatest Greek military force
until
too'
land, and iler allies provided adequate naval support
that arm *", ,orp"ired by the creation of the all-powerful
Athenian fleet.
Yetthefactremainsthat,fromthePersianWarson,Spartan
history is one of decline, despite her coalition victory (aided by
Persian gold) over Athens in 4o4' Her xenophobic society was
remarked iy a steadily decreasing population, for she stubbornly
fused to recruit new citizens even when the need for manpower
of social
became desperate, preferring to arm freed helots, all sorts
Sparta
67
outcasts and even mercenaries. The Peloponnesian War put unbearable pressure not only on manpower but also on leadership:
continuous campaigning by numbers of armies had not been provided for in the system, and some of the new commanders, most
notably Lysander, who achieved the final victory, revealed no
virtues other than ruthless military competence tied to ugly personal ambition. Lack of vision and mental inflexibility, whether
in politics or social matters, proved most ruinous in times of success. Even Sparta's famed egalitarianism turned out to be incomplete and finally unworkable. Kings and commanders quarrelled
frequently, among themselves or with the ephors, and the suspicion seems justified that the disagreements were not merely over
tactics or policy. Abroad Spartans were quickly corrupted and unmanageable. The property system broke down, though we do not
quite know how: an increasing number of Spartans lost their land
allotments, held by them from the state and worked for them by
helots, and with their land they automatically iost their status
as full Spartiates. Others accumulated wealth, though that could
be done only illegally. Herodotus suggests the widespread accessibility of Spartans to bribery as early as the beginning of the
fifth ceutury, with their kings commanding the highest price.
The Sparta which won the Peloponnesian War proved to be
far more hollow than any contemporalv could reasonably have
guessed. In another decade her balanced constitution and her
eunomia failed, and sfasis struck, though only briefly. Then came
the defeat by Thebes in 37r. Thereafter, though Sparta still played
a role in Greek politics, it was as a ghost of past gloly. In a real
crisis-as Philip of Macedon saw-she was only a minor state, like
hundreds of others, no longer a serious force in the real world.
And in the third century, finally and ironica\, she virtually blew
up in one of the most virulent civil wars in all Greek history. But
the myth of Sparta was nevertheless strong and tenacious. The
brilliance of Athens must not blot out the fact that there were
Greeks (and men in all later ages too) for whom Sparta was the
ideal. She was the model of the closed society, admired by those
68
The Classical CitY'State
who rejected an open society with its factional politics, its acceptance of the d.emos as a political force, its frequent "lack of discipline," its recognition of the dignity and claims of the individual'
THE DECLINE OF'THE POLIS
After the battle of Chaeronea in 338, Philip II of Macedon
was effectively the master of Greece (excluding the Sicilian and
other western Greeks ) . He then summoned all the states to a corgress in Corinth, where a Irague of the Hellenes was founded,
with the king as head and commander-in-chief, and with two
objectives explicitly stated. One was an invasion of Persia on the
remarkably thin pretext of getting revenge for the Persian desecration of Greek shrines r 50 years earlier. The other was to employ
the combined strength of the member states to insure, in the
words of an anonymous writer later in the centuqy (PseudoDemosthenes XVII r5), that in no city-state "shall there be ex'
ecution or banishment contraly to the established laws of the
poleis, nor confiscation of property, nor redistribution of land, nor
cancellation of debts, nor freeing of slaves for purposes of revolution."
No single action could have summed up more completely the
change that had come over Greek politics- Stasls had always been
a threat, and sometimes a bitter reality, but never before had it
been possible, or even thinkable, that the other Greek states, including Athens, should organize to maintain the status quo as a
matter of general policy, not to be confused with intewention
by one state, usually a more powerful one, in the internal afiairs of
another to protect its own state interests. Relations with Persia
had had a chequered history, but now, as Isocrates, the most
persistent and straight-talking propagandist of the war-of-revenge
programme, revealed on more than one occasion.,in his pamphlets,
invasion of the Persian Empire was proPosed as the only way to
save Greece from itself: to provide a cause which would divert
The Decline af the
Polis
69
the Greeks from fighting one another, to provide booty with which
to fill empty public treasuries, and to oPen up territory for emigration. And the saviour, the man under whose hegemony all these
great things were to be accomplished, was a despot and an outsider, at best an "honorary Hellene," whose own motives and interests, it need scarcely be said, were fundamentally not those of
the Greeks he was to lead.
The success of Philip, repeated by his son Alexander, illustrated
once agaiu, and for the last time, the rule that the political difficulties which were rooted in the fragmentation of Hellas were
susceptible only to an imposed solution, whether by a more powerful Greek state or by a powerful outsider. No one, not even the
proponents of pan-Hellenic peace and coalition, suggested political
integration of the city-states into larger units, for example. And
no one was able to suggest, even hypothetically, how to ovelcome
the poverty of natural resources and the low level of technology,
except by moving out against Persia. Whenever in Greek history
economic difficulties became critical, and that meant agrarian
crisis, they were solved either by revolutionary means or by looking
abroad, whether by emigration to new lands, as in the long
colonization period, or by one or another form of Pressure on other
Greeks. Now, in the fourth centuly, the areas open to expansion
abroad were severely restricted, and the relative weakness of the
once great states gave much scope for intra-Hellenic warfare almost
without end. Not even the sanctuaries were immune: in 356 the
Phocians seized Delphi and used its treasure to hire a mercenary
force of lo,o@ and become for a fleeting moment the greatest
military power in all Greece.
The available evidence suggests that in the period 39y375
there were never less than z5,ooo Greek mercenaries in active
service somewhere, and that later the figure rose to 5qooo. The
significance of these numbers is underscored by matching them
against the low population figures as a whole, and by noticing
how widely the mercenaries ranged, how indifferent they were to
"national" considerations in their search for employment. The cen-
The Clnssical CitY-State
tury opened with the most famous of all Greek mercenary armies,
the "Ten T'housand" of Xenophon's Anabasis who marched east
on behalf of the younger brother of the Persian king in his unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne. In t43 we find another
lo,ooo Greeks-rooo from Thebes, 3ooo from Argos, and 6ooo
from Asia Minor-in the army with which the Persians recaptured
Egypt for their empire.
Nor were mercenaries the only footloose Greeks at the time.
The number of political exiles was very large too, though they
cannot be counted: the story is inherently improbable that zo,ooo
of them assembled at the Olympic Games in 724 to hear read out
Alexander's decree ordering the Greek states to accept the return
of all exiles, but there is no reason to suspect the figure itself
as a clue to how many exiles there were to be dealt with under the
decree. Many more exiles, furthermore' were established in new
homes and had no wish to return to the old. In the years immediately before Chaeronea, for example, the Corinthian Timoleon, following a spectacular campaign to clear Sicily of tyrants,
recolonized a badly depleted Syracuse with volunteers from the
Greek mainland and islands and even from'Asia Minor. Tens of
thousands apparently answered the call, some political exiles but
no small number ordinary Greeks hoping to find a better liveli-
70
hood.
All this movement, like the constant stasis, marked a failing of
-the more the polis
the community, and therefore of the polis.
had to hire its armed forces; the more citizens it could no longer
satisfy economically, and that meant above all with land, so
that they went elsewhere in order to live; the more it failed to
maintain some sort of equilibrium between the few and the many;
the more the cities were populated by outsiders, whether free
migrants from abroad or emancipated slaves (who can be called
metaphorically free migrants from within)-the less meaningful,
the less real was the community. "Decline" is a tricky and dangerous word to use in this context: it has biological overtones which
are inappropriate, and it evokes a continuous downhill move-
The Decline of the Polis
7r
ment in all aspects of civilization which is demonstrably false.
Yet there is no escaping the evidence: the fourth century was the
time when the Greek polis declined, unevenly, with bursts of
recovery and heroic moments of struggle to save itself, to become,
after Alexander, a sham polis in which the preservation of many
external forms of polis llfe could not conceal that henceforth the
Greeks lived, in Clemenceau's words, "in the sweet peace of
decadence, accepting all sorts of servitudes as they came."
And again Athens was the exception. Her political system made
extraordinary demands on the political skill and stability of her
citizens and on their financial resources, which the loss of empire
intensified many times over. It was no accident that several of
her most important fourth-century leaders were experts in public
finance, a theme which recurs persistently in the political speeches
of Demosthenes. Or that so much diplomatic activity was concentrated on the Black Sea areas, where Athens was c'ompelled to
guarantee and protect her vital corn supplies by skill in diplomacy
alone, now that she was no longer mistress of the Aegean in an
imperial way. The final test was set by the Macedonians, and
after years of understandable hesitation and debate the Athenian
demos decided to fight for the independence of the polis (which is
the same thing as saying the survival of the polis) and they almost
succeeded. They failed, and then the end carne rapidly, symbolized
in a single action, the handing over in 3zz of Demosthenes and
a
number of his colleagues to the Macedonians for execution.
Yet even fourth-century Athens was not free from signs of the
general decline. Contemporary political commentators themselves
made much of the fact that whereas right through the fifth century
political leaders were, and were expected to bg military leaders
at the same timg so that among the ten generals were regularly
found the outstanding political figures (elected to the office because of their political importance, not the other way round),
in the fourth century the two sides of public activity, the civil
and the military, were separated. The generals were now pro
fessional soldiers, most of them quite outside politics or political
The Classical City-State
influence, who often sewed foreign Powers as mercenary commanders as well as serving their own polis. Tltere are a number
of reasons for the shift, among which the inadequate finances of
the state rank high, but, whatever the explanation, the break was
a bad thing for the polis, a cleavage in the responsibility of the
members to their community which weakened the sense of community without producing visibly better generalship. In the navy
the signs took a difierent form. A heavy share of the costs still
fell on the richest 12oo men and the navy continued to perform
well, but there was more evasion of responsibility, more need than
before to compel the contributions and to pursue the defaulters
at law. The crews themselves were often conscripted; voluntary
enlistment could no longer provide the necessary complements.
No doubt that was primarily because the treasury was too depleted
to provide regular pay for long periods, iust as the unwillingness
of io*e to contribute their allotted share of the expenses resulted
from an unsatisfactory system of distributing the burden, rather
than from lack of patriotism. wherever the responsibility lay, however, the result was again a partial breakdowrl in the polis'
There is no need to exaggerate: Athens nearly carried it ofi,
and the end came because Macedon, or at least Alexander, was
simply too powerful. But Macedon did exist, and so did Persia and
Carihage, and later Rome. Ttte polis was developed in such a
world, not in a vacuum or in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, and it grew on
poor Greek soil. was it really a viable form of political organiza'
iionl Were its decline and disappealance the result of factors
which could have been remedied, or of an accident-the power of
Macedon-or of inherent structural weaknesses? These questions
have exercised philosophers and historians ever since the late fifth
century (and i[ is noteworthy how the problem was being posed
long before the polis could be thought of as on its way out in any
titeiat sense). Plato wished to rescue it by placing all authority in
the hands of morally perfect philosophers' O.thers blame the
demos and their misleaders, the demagogues, for every ill' Still
others, especially in the past century or so, insist on the stupid
The Decline of the Polis
7j
disparity,
these
For
all
their
national
state.
a
in
failure to unite
solutions all have one thing in common: they all Propose to rescue
ttre polis by destroying it, by replacing it, in its root sense of a community which is at the same time a self-governing state, by something else. Ttre polis, one concludes, was a brilliant conception,
but one which required so rare a combination of material and institutional circumstances that it could never be realized; that it
could be approximated only for a very brief period of time; that it
had a past, a fleeting present, and no future. In that fleeting moment its members succeeded in capturing and recording, as man
has not often done in his history, the greatness of which the
human mind and spirit are capable.